2016 Call for Participation

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Category: announcements

Published on Wednesday, 09 September 2015 19:44

Written by Kevin Waugh

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The Annual Computer Poker Competition will be held again in 2016, during the month of January.  Kevin Waugh will be returning the competition chair.  As in previous years there will be a heads-up (two player) no-limit Texas Hold'em competition and a three-player Kuhn competition.  

The status of the two-player limit and three-player limit Texas Hold’em events is not yet finalized.  The steering committee feels that these events have stagnated and are failing to meet their scientific goals.  We anticipate altering, or replacing these two competitions in future years.  This year, we will hold these two events given sufficient interest (i.e., 6 or more teams).  Any individuals or teams who wish to partake in either the two-player limit or three-player limit events will need to send an email by October 1 to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. expressing their interest.  We will announce the status of these two events at that time. 

The current plan is to use Amazon EC2 instances again this year, with a final submission deadline of January 4.  Note that these machines are quite a bit less powerful than many desktop machines, so if computing resources are a significant issue for you, please check that this is adequate.  We have not yet finalized the hardware and storage limitations for this year.  We anticipate increasing the storage limit and migrating to the newer EC2 generation.  We will announce the final hardware specifications on October 2.  See (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) for details on Amazon instance types. It is possible to get access to a smaller testing instance through Amazon for free by creating an EC2 account, and all competitors will get access to a full sized competition machine for final testing at least one week prior to the final submission deadline.

Any individuals or teams that wish to participate will need to send an email by December 1 to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. expressing their interest.  We would like to know which competition events you are interested in entering, and if you have participated in the past.  If you require any special software - anything that is not installed by default on an Amazon EC2 instance - you must let us know by December 1, so we can try to make sure your requirements are met.  Your expression of interest email is not a formal commitment, but lets us plan for the time and resources required to run the competition.

2014 Results announced

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Category: announcements

Published on Wednesday, 06 August 2014 18:19

Written by Kevin Waugh

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The 2014 computer poker competition results were first announced at the AAAI Workshop on Computer Poker and Imperfect Information.  Complete results, including hand histories and more detailed descriptions of the entries, are now available.

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the competition this year!

Two-player Limit Hold'em Total Bankroll:

1. Escabeche
2. SmooCT
3. Hyperborean

Hyperborean and Feste are not separated by a statistically significant margin.
Due to an error by the chair in setting the size of the blinds, these results differ from what was originally announced.

Two-player no-limit Instant Runoff:

1. Tartanian7
2. Prelude
3. Hyperborean

Prelude, Hyperborean and Slumbot are not separated by a statistically significant margin.

Two-player no-limit Total Bankroll:

1. Tartanian7
2. Nyx
3. Prelude

Nyx, Prelude and Slumbot are not separated by a statistically significant margin.

Three-player limit Hold'em Total Bankroll:

1. Hyperborean
2. SmooCT
3. KEmpfer

Three-player limit Hold'em Instant Runoff:

1. Hyperborean
2. SmooCT
3. KEmpfer

Three-player Kuhn:

1. Hyperborean
2. lucifer
3. HITSZ_CS

2015 three-player Kuhn competition - Call for Participation

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Category: announcements

Published on Thursday, 27 November 2014 22:29

Written by Kevin Waugh

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The Annual ComputerPokerCompetition will *not* be held again in 2015 due to AAAI permanently shifting ahead by 6 months.  As was discussed at the 2014 workshop, the organizers and many competitors felt that there would not be enough time to create substantially new agents.  The competition, in its standard form, will return in 2016 with an entry deadline sometime around December 2015.

In the interim, we will be holding a three player Kuhn poker bankroll competition for the 2015 workshop.  Despite the simplicity of the game, it is unsolvable.  That is, unlike in two-player zero-sum games, an agent playing its portion of a Nash equilibrium is not optimal and can be taken advantage of by two coordinated agents.  The intent of this contest is to provide a venue to investigate opponent modeling techniques that for statistical or computational reasons cannot be applied in three player Texas Hold’em.  

The barrier to entry is relatively low, and agents need not be as sophisticated as in the larger Hold’em games.  Some starter code can be found at https://github.com/kdub0/kuhn3p and last year’s entrants will be posted soon.  We hope that many of the past competitors will be able to contribute so as to have a fun and vibrant competition.

Entries will be allowed up to 10MB of uncompressed disk space.  Because the game is so small, entries will be allowed fairly minimal compute time: no more than 1 second per hundred hands, with the competition run on t1.micro (1 core 600MB RAM).  We ask that all competitors submit source code for their player.  That is, there will not be a hosted benchmark server.  If your agent relies on tables, or some other long running computation, you are not required to submit the code to generate this data.

Any individuals or teams that wish to participate will need to send an email by Jan 12 to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. expressing their interest.  The entries are due on Jan 16, 2015 and results will be announced at the AAAI Workshop on Computer Poker and Imperfect Information on Jan 26.  Your expression of interest email is not a formal commitment, but lets us plan for the time and resources required to run the competition.

2014 Competition Update

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Category: announcements

Published on Sunday, 08 June 2014 19:47

Written by Kevin Waugh

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